Disk Clone goes wrong: black screen with flashing cursor

I used Acronis TI (9 I think) to clone my HDD. I had a 150 GB disk that was my primary drive and a 40 Gb as secondary.

Because my media library (MP3s, Photos, etc) has grown quite large, I wanted to make the 40 GB disk be the main system disk and make the bigger 150 GB disk be my media-files disk.

So I used the Clone Disk feature in True Image.

I stepped out of the room during the clone process and when I came back the screen was black with nothing but a flashing cursor.

So I shut it down and opened the case. I took out the original primary disk and moved the secondary (now cloned to be the new primary) into the primary slot (yes, I switched the jumpers too).

I booted it up and all is fine. Great. It worked very well. Thank you Acronis!

Now, I want that other disk (the big one) to go back in as a secondary disk. so I switch the jumpers to the "slave" position, and plug it into the IDE cable. I boot it up but Windows doesn't see the disk at all. There is a letter assignment missing where the disk should be (G:\) but it's just not there.

So, I figure I'll format the disk maybe. so I shut doen, removed my new primary disk, put the jumper back to "Master" on the big drive and try to boot from it. The computer shows the graphics card screen, shows the Motherboard screen (with "press Del for setup" prompt), then goes to a flashing cursor and does nothing more.

I deleted into the BIOS settings and the disk seems to show up in the boot devices list (it has the make and model and everything so I know it sees the disk).

No matter how many times I try I can't get this disk to show up as a master OR slave at all. I even put the disk in an enlosure and tried to plug it in as an external. Windows saw it as new hardware, installed it (again calling it by name even!) but it failed to show up as a disk under "My Computer".

Any thoughts?


My system:
Asus P4 2.4 Ghz running Windows Xp home (Sp2)
1 Gb RAM
And well.... only one HDD right now!

 

FOUND IT!

In the interest of helping others who may come across this problem, here's what I did:

When I cloned the HDD I resized some of my partitions as well at the same time. Doing this I knew "The data on the originating disk will be lost permanently" because of the warning in TI. I knew that and it was OK with me.

What I didn't know though, was that not only would the data be LOST, but TI didn't perform any sort of format on the disk after it finished the clone. So the originating disk was 100% UNALLOCATED space. Not one big, empty partition ready to slave, but rather completely unallocated.

I saw this when I installed it as slave, then in Windows went to "System Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management (I think that's the path --I'm on my Mac right now). The disk showed up in there but was marked as unallocated. So I simply formatted it from there and now I have a 150GB disk for my MP3s!

Yay! Thanks Acronis (I just wish the message was a little clearer on what to do with my disk if I ever wanted to use it again, or if there was a built in option to automatically re-format the disk after the clone raher than leave it unallocated)